PUBLIC LIVES

PUBLIC LIVES; Reticent Novelist Talks Baseball, Not Books

By DAVID FIRESTONE

Published: September 10, 1998

WHEN the ball went over the fence Tuesday night -- and there is no longer any need to say which ball or which fence -- it shot into a dark utility space, perhaps the only gray area in the whole sunlit spectacle of this year's home-run daydream. Watching it go, feeling the old stirring once again, Don DeLillo briefly hoped the ball was truly lost somewhere in the darkness, perhaps rolling down history's drainpipe into lasting mystery.

''That would have been interesting,'' he said yesterday, cherishing the mischief of the notion.

But it was not to be, and Mr. DeLillo knows the century too well to believe otherwise. In 1951, the ball that Bobby Thomson hit out of the Polo Grounds disappeared forever into the crowd and lodged in Mr. DeLillo's imagination, becoming a holy relic of memory that appears at significant moments of ''Underworld,'' his acclaimed cold-war novel of last fall. The ball, quietly changing hands over the decades, winds up on the shelf of the novel's protagonist, who fondles its curves and seams at 4 A.M. to summon the past.

This year's ball, transfigured by Mark McGwire's bat, was marked with an infrared identifying code and immediately retrieved by a groundskeeper for the St. Louis Cardinals, who moments later told a live television audience that he would forgo the memorabilia market and return it to Mr. McGwire and the Hall of Fame. For this generosity, he was quickly invested with the trappings of modern sainthood: a free trip to Disneyworld, a meeting with the President and even an appearance on David Letterman's show.

Mr. DeLillo, whose explorations of America's waste places and dark compulsions have made him one of the country's premier novelists, finds this selflessness laudatory, but believes the neatly packaged moments are finally impoverishing.

''Every baseball carries with it the history of the game, in a mysterious way that you don't find in football or tennis or basketball,'' he said, speaking as a lifetime Yankee fan who grew up in the Belmont section of the Bronx, his team's home borough. ''People have scrambled over baseballs, fought over baseballs, and the wonderful mystery of the Bobby Thomson home-run ball is in part what prompted me to write 'Underworld.' If we knew who had that baseball, it's possible I never would have begun work on the novel.''

It is mystery that feeds the imagination, and it is mystery, he believes, that is being drained from the public arena, with its multiple camera shots, instant replays and snap moral judgments.

''We want to know everything and we want to show everything,'' he said. ''It's all ultimately a function of technology. In the days of Thomson and Ralph Branca, there was no videotape. The home run could not be shown repeatedly, it could not be exhausted by midnight of the first day. I think that in part accounts for the longevity of that ball game, because it was not consumed so instantly and so readily. The newsreel footage looks like something out of World War I, and there's something precious about this fact.''

For this reason, Mr. DeLillo believes that Mr. McGwire's triumph will eventually fade in the public mind faster than Thomson's, blurred by the repetition that he calls ''an offense against memory.'' What may last, however, is Mr. McGwire's gesture across time, reaching back to 1961 with his embrace in the stands of the family of Roger Maris, the Yankee who was the longtime record-holder.

''It was a wonderful gesture,'' said Mr. DeLillo, who like Mr. McGwire's father is 61 years old. ''It was so interesting to see how closely the sons resembled Maris himself. One's memory of Maris is of a haunted face with sunken eyes, perhaps in part because he is still to us a figure in black and white rather than in four colors. I can picture Maris in his Cardinal uniform in color, but as a Yankee, he's permanently part of my black-and-white memory.''

THE power of memory is one of Mr. DeLillo's great themes, and he talks of it easily, in flowing descriptive sentences with long silences in between, unafraid to be seen thinking carefully before he speaks. Though he dislikes interviews and seemed physically pained by a camera's lens a few inches from his face, he readily agreed to talk about baseball, not as a tired literary metaphor for American life but as a portal that Americans have traditionally used to transcend their lives.

The race to overtake Maris is the ''bright side'' of the country's obsession with fame and wealth and spectacle, he said, the antidote to the depressing scandalous news from Washington. He has known of this power since his childhood pickup games on the streets of St. Martin's parish, since that day in 1951 when he saw so much of the city kindle in exuberance after Thomson's famous pennant-winning home run. (Actually, he was sitting in his dentist's chair at the time, but he still remembers.)

He lives in Westchester now, working on a play called ''Valparaiso'' that soon will open in Boston, occasionally dipping into his favorite restaurants on Arthur Avenue and letting himself drift into monochrome.

''I went to Cardinal Hayes High School, which is in very easy walking distance of Yankee Stadium,'' he said. ''I remember one afternoon, in October, hearing a strange sound, a little like surf, and wondering what it was. And later I realized it was the sound made by the crowd at Yankee Stadium when Tommy Henrich hit a late-inning home run. It was against the Dodgers.''